Representing Realities

SPELL 16 collects papers from the biennal Conference of the Swiss Association for North-American Studies (SANAS) held at the University of Lausanne in November 2002. The essays demonstrate the complexity of the leap from experiential reality to representation as they range over North American texts from Cooper to CNN, through Thoreau and Marilyn, and embrace biography, photography, philosophy and poetry, prose fiction and maps, film and television news. Many of the authors probe into the very processes involved in mediating the plural realities of the given world - a world of natural objects, individuals in their culturally specific milieus and events such as the Vietnam WAR an 9/11. In their various ways, they all examine our contemporary understanding of how cultural representations are fashioned from what are considered "realities" and then renewed, used or abused. While some stress the often conflictual encounter among realities, assumptions and motivations, others recommend new interpretive attitudes as regards both given realities and created texts.